If you have a news tip, story idea or concern
about the multibillion-dollar rebuilding effort following Katrina,
send a brief note to katrina@usatoday.com.
Include your name and a phone number or e-mail address. USA TODAY
may use the contact information to reach you, but your name remain
confidential until you give permission for its use.

On Wednesday night, two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Leeann Epstein watched the devastation on TV and cried herself to sleep.

American Red Cross volunteer Mary Breslin helps Earl Davis carry supplies after he returned to his home after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

By Ethan Miller, Getty Images

She slept poorly, waking at 4 a.m., determined to help. With her youngest child having just left for college, the St. Michaels, Md., resident decided to empty most of her linen closet, box the items and mail them south.

"By the time I got to the end of my driveway, I had another idea," says Epstein, the office manager of her husband's dental practice. She'd ask the 55 other members of the Junior Women's Club to donate items. Within hours, dozens agreed, as did the men's club and the business association.

By Sunday afternoon, the entire Chesapeake Bay town got involved. Residents filled two trucks with relief supplies, collected $18,900 in cash and waved goodbye to five volunteers who drove the vehicles non-stop to a small Alabama coastal town in desperate need of help.

Like Epstein, tens of thousands of Americans — young, old, rich, poor — have interrupted their lives and careers in a burst of volunteerism unprecedented in the United States. They are doctors, pilots, radio ham operators, truck drivers, kitchen helpers. Some work with groups such as the Red Cross. Others act alone.

Some volunteers, such as former NBA star Karl Malone and Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre, are famous. Most aren't.

"We're reaching historic highs," Marty Evans, president and CEO of the 124-year-old American Red Cross, says of interest in volunteering. More than 163,000 Red Cross-trained disaster workers, mostly volunteers, from all 50 states are providing relief. After the 9/11 attacks, 54,577 volunteers did so.

Like the Red Cross, the federal agency that oversees the volunteer AmeriCorps and Senior Corps is also planning its largest mobilization ever of relief workers. "This could be three or four times larger" than last year's effort to help Florida recover from four hurricanes, says Sandy Scott, spokesman for the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Now, a month after Katrina, several charities say volunteer interest is starting to slacken in some areas. Still, they say they're amazed at how many people are signing up, especially online.

"We've been just overwhelmed with calls and e-mails," said Joedy Isert, spokesman for Habitat for Humanity, which began its Katrina pilot project this week in Los Angeles, Jackson, Miss., and New York City's Rockefeller Center. "The numbers have just exploded."

Isert says more than 12,000 volunteers have signed up online to help build houses to be transported to the hurricane zone. "We're looking for people of all skills," he says. "We also welcome people who've never swung a hammer."

Yet some charities, including the Salvation Army, say areas with few evacuees may not need as many volunteers. Some volunteers say they've gone to the Gulf only to find they're not needed.

Steven Lerner, an internist and pulmonary specialist in private practice in Washington, D.C., joined George Washington University's Medical Relief Team. He was sent to Louisiana. Arriving Sept. 12, he found plenty of medical staff for the relatively few patients in New Orleans. In the future, he says the response needs to be better "stratified and coordinated." Still, he found the volunteer spirit impressive. "It's unbelievable the humanistic outpouring," he says. "It's a very pro-American feeling."

Some go it alone

While many volunteers work with churches or charities, some are striking out on their own — and defying obstacles.

Malone, a Louisiana native, took a crew of men from his logging company in Arkansas to Pascagoula, Miss., where they've spent the last two weeks working 12-hour days hauling away Katrina debris.

When he arrived, he says Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials told him he wasn't authorized to bring his machinery into the area. He stayed anyway. "I saw devastation and people with nobody to turn to," he says.

Other pro athletes have gotten involved. Favre's foundation has raised nearly $600,000 and sent more than 60 semi trucks filled with relief supplies to the Gulf.

Detroit Pistons forward Ron Dupree, who grew up in Biloxi, Miss., helped collect goods and unload a plane packed with 20 tons of toiletries, diapers, baby food and other items last week in Biloxi and Baton Rouge. "The east side of Biloxi looks like a bomb went off," he says. "To see a familiar city in devastation is heartbreaking."

Epstein initially offered the items her town collected to the Red Cross but was told the charity only accepts money. She asked the Salvation Army to lend a truck but was told it would take three weeks.

She and co-volunteers wanted to act more quickly. They managed to find people willing to lend two trucks and people willing to drive them. Because they avoided red tape, she says they reached a rural area where neither FEMA nor the Red Cross had appeared.

A cherished U.S. tradition

Unlike some countries, especially in Europe, where government plays a more dominant role, the United States has a strong tradition of local groups picking up the slack, says Peter Frumkin, director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the University of Texas-Austin.

He says the level of volunteerism has generally increased over the last four decades. The biggest change, he says, is the gender shift.

"Volunteerism was thought to be a woman's work for a long time," he says. Now, men view it as an add-on to what they can't do in the workplace. He says some companies offer volunteer opportunities to boost worker retention.

Women, though, continue to volunteer at a higher rate than men, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released in December 2004. One-fourth of men and about one-third of women did some volunteer work in the 12 months before September 2004.

Overall, more Americans are volunteering since 9/11. About 64 million people did so from September 2002 to September 2003, up from 60 million the prior year.

Frumkin says many people volunteer as a way to enact their values. "It's a way of expressing caring," he says.

"We do it because God's given us the skills to do it," says Richard Paat, an internist in private practice in Toledo, Ohio, who recently returned from his fifth medical mission with the Salvation Army. Paat put together a medical team of 16, along with $40,000 worth of medical supplies, and spent 11 days in Biloxi. His team treated 1,600 patients, some with acute injuries, others with asthma, heat exhaustion and post-traumatic stress.

The father of three kids, ages 12 to 16, he made personal sacrifices. His wife tended the home front, while his 75-year-old father, also a doctor, worked full time to keep his practice running.

David Belsky, a project manager for IBM in Westford, Mass., knows well the sacrifices. "It's definitely hard," he says about the two weeks he's spent away from his wife and 6-year-old daughter. But when he saw the devastating Katrina images on TV, his wife knew he wanted to help. Belsky, a Red Cross volunteer for eight years, says his wife and his boss were very supportive. Belsky has spent most of his time near Baton Rouge distributing laptops, phones and other communications equipment. He returned Thursday.

Needed '20 times as much'

Epstein, experiencing empty-nest syndrome for the first time, says she wanted to keep busy.

Co-organizer Rosemary Fasolo, whose child also recently left for college, closed her photo business for two days so residents could use its outdoor areas to drop off donations. She says volunteers carefully organized the drive, specifying items that would be most useful. They logged each item and checked each piece of clothing.

"If we wouldn't wear it, we wouldn't send it," Fasolo says.

When the trucks left St. Michaels, Epstein says they didn't know their destination. She called truckers in the Gulf to find out where the greatest needs were. She found a church in Mobile that wanted help, so the trucks went there. When they arrived, National Guardsmen directed them to the smaller, coastal town of Bayou La Batre, Ala., about 30 miles away.

On the southeastern end of town, miles from a distribution center, volunteer driver Gary Guyette says people hadn't received anything other than tomatoes two men in a truck were handing out.

"We were just mobbed. The older people kept getting out-hustled ... It was survival of the fittest," says Guyette, who runs an anti-que hunting-decoy auction.

"The dazed people who didn't know what to do — that was the hardest part."

The volunteers on the 18-wheeler truck and the box truck unloaded their food, water, diapers, clothes, linens and other goods. Guyette and another driver used the cash St. Michaels had collected to drive two hours to a grocery, reload the box truck twice and distribute more food and water.

"They could have used 20 times as much food," he says.

Epstein says St. Michaels' relief effort is not over. The town plans to adopt Bayou La Batre and is collecting more money and goods. She says the owner of a 200-room hotel is willing to donate all his furniture as he moves up the date of a renovation.

She's amazed at what happened. She says: "It just got so much bigger than I originally thought."